TechnoLogics

Adding to the growing field of posthuman or cyborg studies, TechnoLogics explores how our position in the technologized world reorders, in the most radical ways imaginable, our basic experience of the lines governing literary, philosophical, and cultural production. The ancient dream of immortality is now becoming realized through cloning, genetic research, and artificial intelligence, bringing with it the need for new forms of both reading and living in the everyday world. In this emerging cyborg culture, what is to come for us is not predictable but, instead, an open possibility to be shaped by the work of, among others, artists, computer designers, scientists, and writers. Through encounters with Plato, Melville, Marx, Jünger, Heidegger, Freud, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren identifies the causes, characteristics, and links between the most primordial of wishes—immortality—and the highest of high tech, and asks how, in our culture of technocapitalism, we can continue to listen to the faint call of ethics.

Introduction

TechnoLogics is an attempt to understand the uncanny logic
that is unfolding for all of us as it enfolds all of us in its multiple
orders. It concerns itself with small prefixes such as un-,
re-, and in-, as well as with the broad movements of history that leap
from the Hebrew Bible and Plato straight into the nineteenth century
and beyond. Rather than directly analyze the chronological...

I. Laying Down the Power Grid

1. Call Forwarding

Cloning, the immortality of the reproduction of the same, has
always been the openly secret dream of homo phantasticus,
but such dreaming, in the dominant history of the west, has
been subsumed by the logic of the drive for the rational explication
and use of the world that we have come to call metaphysics. This
subsumption has not destroyed the dreaming, but, rather, has installed...

2. On-(the)-Line

There is a low humming in the background.
Everything is now on-line. Powered up.
We must, whether we want to or not, put ourselves on the
line as well.
What, though, is a line? What is the course of the line between
the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate? What does it
mean that now, driven by the program of technology, we are attempting
crossings back and forth across that line that has long been...

3. The Platonic Teleport

Plato launches metaphysics, the thought-program that will give
rise to cloning, artificial intelligence, and the crisscrossing of
the (in)animate at the turning of the transepochal. And this Platonic
template—with multiple revisions, to be sure—is teleported as
far into the future as we can see. The file carries the name, among
others, of cognitive science, the human genome project, AI, and vir-...

II. Ghosts in the Machines

4. The Elixir of Life

Many specters haunt the nineteenth century. One of them is
called communism, but there is an uncanny phantasmagoria
of other names produced by the encounter between the
ghosts of the past and the ghosts of the future in a present that is
haunted by both. As capital, linked with the sciences, begins to gain
the power to realize ancient dreams of immortality, Nathaniel...

5. The Immortality Machine of Capitalism

In 1833, Karl Marx turned twelve years old and alchemy,
Frankenstein, and capitalism awaited his coming. What Marx
would come to understand better than anyone else in the nineteenth
century was the historical sociality—the “social brain” of
emergent capitalism—of all human events, and it was Marx who first
demonstrated how the alchemical dream of immortality had been...

6. Bartleby the Incalculable

Plato responded to the call of the distinguishability of numbers
and letters, constructing a matrix of value that was, after its incarnation
as the Hegelian Weltgeist, overturned by Marx, who
responded to the call of labor, alchemy, money, justice, and a table
that was not a table. Already for Marx, the world was haunted by the
frozen desire of commodities, fetishes, the vampire of capital, and...

III. The Suspension of Animation

7. The Drone of Technocapitalism

On the occasion of his 100th birthday, Ernst Jünger briefly
commented on the century in which he has lived. Concerning
the year of his birth, 1895, Jünger recalled the Dreyfus affair
in France and Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, which “finally made
the invisible visible and made possible new measurements of the organic
and the inorganic world.”1 This is where we today exist: on the...

8. The Psychotelemetry of Surveillance

If Zapparoni represents the possibility of absolute surveillance in
a world dominated by the electronic surveillance produced by the
twinning of science and capitalism, his domain has been under
preparation, as we have seen, for a very long time, passing along a
network articulated first by Plato but carried along by all the transformers
in the West. That net included Oedipus, which also creates its...

9. Temps: Time, Work, and the Delay

We are all temps.
Riding the tides of time that ebb and flow, settle and swirl.
Weathered and scored. Scoured. “There is a ’now’ of the
untimely; there is a singularity which is that of this disjunction of
the present” (Derrida and Ferraris 2002, 12).
Here today, gone tomorrow. Split. Timed out.
Provisionally employed, tensely employed in the legerdemain of...

Conclusion: Heeding the Phantomenological

Perhaps, though, in the end nothing has changed. After all, we
all wake up in the morning, go about our business as we live
out our numbered days, and then slip away, at one time or another,
into sleep at first and then, at last, into the night of nothingness.
We continue to hope for a long life, for love in its many forms,
and for a graciously courageous death. We are anxious about being...

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